I asked no questions at that clinic.

I signed what I was told to sign.

I let them handle everything, because I was too shattered to do anything else, and everyone around me, especially Marcus, seemed so competent and so caring in taking the burden from my hands.

It would be many hours before the fog lifted enough for me to understand that the competence and the caring had been, from the very first phone call, a performance.

Grief is the perfect cover for a crime against the grieving, and I have thought about that, since, with a bitterness I try not to let define me.